Valve casually gut Counter-Strike's billion dollar skins market with a "small update"

Extended "trade-up" diagnostic torpedos the terms of knives and gloves

Ah Valve, you awful, giggling vultures. You unspeakable purveyors of mischief and misfortune. Weeks spell past without you making immoderate important game-related announcements, and past you abruptly dropkick the full Counter-Strike cosmetics system into the sun.

The developers person released what they breezily telephone a "small update" for Counter-Strike 2 that, essentially, allows players to speech 5 cosmetic items for different items that merchantability for a lot, batch much implicit the Counter-Strike subordinate marketplace. As such, they person crashed the terms of the second items and, according to tracking app Price Empire, wiped billions of US dollars disconnected the worth of the CS2 skins market.

As passed connected by Gamesradar, the update successful question extends the functionality of the 'Trade Up Contract', which allows players to swap communal "Covert" items obtained from purchaseable cases for overmuch rarer knives oregon gloves, including "StatTrakTM" cogwheel that, arsenic the sanction implies, tracks definite play statistic erstwhile equipped.

The Trade Up declaration present lets radical speech 5 StatTrakTM Covert prime items for "one StatTrakTM Knife from a postulation of 1 of the items provided", oregon 5 regular Covert items for "one regular Knife point oregon 1 regular Gloves point from a postulation of 1 of the items provided". The effect is that Covert skins person changeable up successful price, portion the terms of knives and gloves has plummeted.

The numbers successful question are not tiny. They are successful information rather large. One Covert tegument collector says that their 609 hitherto "worthless reddish skins" are present worthy £3,329,612 connected the marketplace. One responsive comments that "my weapon conscionable dropped $1,400 successful worth successful the span of 30 minutes".

Reactions to each this connected the Counter-Strike subreddit people alteration rather a bit, with weapon and mitt collectors spitting mad, portion others remark that this is large for caller players who don't person the pouch wealth for a $400 make-believe dagger. Over astatine Forbes, Mike Stubbs speculates that this is really Valve's mode of punishing weapon and mitt dealers for selling the items connected outer marketplaces, adjacent astatine the outgo of sabotaging the CS subordinate cosmetics biz (from which Valve takes a cut) successful the abbreviated term. I'll spell inquire the developers if they'd similar to remark connected each this.